If Love Could Save
by AndromedaStarr
Summary: Logan is being held hostage by a madman. It's up to Goren to defuse the situation. Will he succeed? Could be either slash or friendship, depending on how you see it. And yes, there is character death. Please review.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: I still do not own L&O: CI. All the honour and glory should go to Dick Wolf. I'm just messing around with his inventions. I make no money from this. Don't sue. 

Warning for major angst and character death.

* * *

Goren got out of the car as soon as Eames pulled up the handbrake. She'd parked the Crown Vic alongside the curb on the other side of the street from the warehouse. The place was swarming with beat cops trying to control the crowd of bystanders, and police cars took up what was left of the road. What with the flashing strobe lights whipping through the darkness and the hubbub of activity, he was already getting a headache.

"Hostage situation," Barek told them quietly. She looked strained. "His name is Harold Weaver. He's a schizophrenic off his medication and he's armed with a .44."

"Who's he got?" Eames asked at precisely the same time that Goren questioned, "Where's Logan?"

Barek bit her lip but didn't speak, and turned haunted dark eyes to the warehouse, where they could hear the faint sounds of a madman yelling.


	2. Action

Darkness surrounded him, thick and black and almost palpable. His wrists ached where Harry had tied him to the pipe. It was some kind of water system that ran throughout the interior of the cold warehouse along the walls. His hands were tied together above his head and to a horizontal piece of pipe set so high he almost had to tiptoe. Harry had used rope and tied the knots tight. Neither the pipe nor the knots showed any sign of give. Logan's shoulder muscles were burning.

Ten feet away, his captor paced, muttering incessantly under his breath in a language Logan didn't recognize. He didn't bear the man any malice personally; he understood that Harry had a problem and that he'd been off his medication for weeks. But that still didn't mean Logan appreciated being at the mercy of a paranoid schizophrenic.

"Harry," he said again. "Let's talk about this."

The man spun on him, the impressive Magnum in his hands shaking. He was twitchy and unstable, and his movements were a jittery cluster of tics and minor convulsions. He made Goren's barely controlled gesticulation look smooth and deliberate. "Nothing to talk about!" he blurted. "They're out there – you're one of them, I know it – I'm not gonna make it, might as well blow us both to hell!"

"Harry, calm down." Logan was trying to control his own breathing. "Please. Nobody's going to hurt you."

"Liar." The man's eyes flicked from side to side. Logan saw sweat beading on his forehead – incredible considering that the temperature was in the early sixties. "You want to kill me, you all want to kill me –" He stopped abruptly as Logan's cell phone, which lay on the ground between them, began to ring.

Logan and Harry stared at the beeping object in equal surprise. "Turn it off," Harry ordered, waving the gun. "Make it stop!"

"Answer it," Logan said. His heart was thudding like the beat to a trance song. "Pick it up and answer it, Harry. It can't hurt you."

Harry inched nearer to the phone. Leaning down, he prodded it with the muzzle of the gun. It kept ringing. Gingerly he picked it up in his left hand and flipped it open. "Hello?"

* * *

"How did Logan end up in a hostage situation?" Eames was asking Barek. In the distance, her partner was on his phone. Vaguely, she wondered, _Who would he be talking to at a time like this?_

"Beat cops," Barek said harshly. "They misjudged the whole thing, said a crazy man had four or five people hostage in a warehouse and he was threatening to send the place sky-high. We got here, Logan went in to defuse the situation and that's when we realized he didn't have _anyone_ in there with him. He was talking to himself the whole time."

Eames whistled softly. She felt unsteady on her feet. "Oh man."

"Yeah." Barek wrapped her arms around herself and turned back to the warehouse. It was eerily silent.

* * *

"I'm going to say this one more time, Weaver." Goren's voice was low and measured, the deadly soft tone he used when he was too angry to outwardly display his temper. "We are not the enemy. It is not as you believed. The medicine was good for you, it suppressed the changes to your personality. You should not have stopped taking it."

On the other end of the phone, he could hear quick, sharp breaths. "You have to undo it, you have to fix me!"

"It's a complex procedure, Weaver. We cannot do it here. You have to come back to the laboratory." Goren closed his eyes. _Mike_. "We can reverse the process, but all bets are off if you terminate the hostage. Do you understand?"

"Why should I believe you?" Harold Weaver's voice was rising into a high, panicky whine. "You're all liars, all of you! Look at what you did to me, you turned me into a – into a –"

"_Weaver_." Goren cut him off. "Shut up. If you want us to fix you and put you back in that hellhole of an apartment, you need to do two things. Are you listening?" There was relative silence in which Goren could hear only panting and fitful mewling noises. "Good. First, you need to sign a strict confidentiality agreement. If you tell anyone about what was done to you – and we mean anyone – we will find you wherever you are and you will never be seen again. And second, you need to release the hostage."

"He's one of you, I know he is," came the feverish reply. "Why should I listen? Why shouldn't I kill him?"

"Because if he dies, we will not kill you." Goren's voice had dropped a few more notes to a poisonous hiss. "We will take you back there and do things to you that you can't even dream. And if you kill yourself before we can get our hands on you, we'll bring you back from the dead. We can do that now, you know. There's no escape."

"Escape..." Harold Weaver breathed the word lovingly, like a prayer.

The phone went dead.


	3. Gunshot

Harry whirled to face Logan. "Your friends," he snarled, eyes unfocused. "They think they're so smart, they think they can outsmart me. Well, they can think again." He was fumbling with the safety on the .44, his fingers unable to get a grip on the slick oiled metal. Logan began to squirm, frantically trying to free his hands. The fibres of the ropes cut into his raw flesh, and there was the slippery feeling of blood lubricating his efforts to escape. But the knots were tight. So tight...

"You think I'm crazy." Harry, gasping for breath, had finally managed to flick off the safety and was now trying to control his hands long enough to get a finger around the trigger. His arms were shaking violently. "Don't you?"

"No, Harry, you're not crazy," Logan said desperately. Now he too was sweating. _There's no time...Bobby..._

Harry shoved the muzzle of the gun against the side of Logan's head with both hands, but despite the obvious effort to steady the weapon, the end of the barrel beat a nervous tattoo on Logan's left temple. "Liar, liar, liar!" he screamed, spit flying from his mouth. "Everyone lies to me, it's all you ever do!"

The gun went off.


	4. Too Late

_I'm too late_, was the first thing Goren thought when he burst into the warehouse. He took in Logan, practically hanging by his hands from a metal pipe, and the man holding the gun against Logan's head at the same time, and reacted purely instinctively. His feet separated into his shooting stance, the Glock in his hands leveled, and his finger hit the trigger –

A split second before Harold Weaver's did.

Goren's shot hit Weaver in the neck, and the man went down, brain-dead. But his body's last muscle contraction, its last nervous tic, was to pull the trigger on the gun in its hand. The bullet did miss Logan's head, where it had originally been intended, but it did not miss his chest. The bullet entered low on the left side of the chest, splintered its way through a rib and tore through both lungs before exiting through Logan's right shoulder blade.

Logan's body jerked with the force of the gunshot. Blood exploded from his side and his back, soaking through his shirt. His knees gave way, and he slumped, the ropes around his bleeding wrists the only things holding him up.

Goren was already sprinting across the warehouse. He drew a knife from his pocket and, wrapping an arm around Logan to support him, sawed through the ropes as best he could. The last few strands broke, and all two hundred and ten pounds of detective collapsed on Goren. Stretching Logan out on the floor, he took stock of the injuries. There would be no need to call for an ambulance.

Backup was pouring through the doors already, a confused group of beat cops, detectives from neighbouring precincts and hostage negotiators. Barek pulled up just short of them and pressed her hand to her mouth. Next to her, Eames' breath caught.

Goren was kneeling, perfectly motionless, in a slowly growing pool of Logan's blood. Several feet away lay a fortyish man with a boyish face and curly dark hair. There was a gaping wound in his neck. Two guns lay in the mingled blood. Logan's green eyes were wide and staring, his lips parted as though in surprise.

Barek was the first to speak. "Logan..." She shook her head in disbelief. "My God."

Eames forced herself out of her shock, stepped forward, and laid her small hand on Goren's broad shoulder. "Bobby."

He shook her off, not rudely but decisively. His white shirt was bloody from the cuffs to the elbows, and he had powder burns on his left hand. His right hand was on Logan's chest, fingers crumpled in the bloody shirt. Blood streaked his forehead from where he had unconsciously touched his own face. He stared down into Logan's vacant eyes and in a breathtakingly tender gesture, gently closed the lids.

Eames pressed her lips together. Tears filled her eyes. Barek turned away. Tentatively, out of the slowly gathering crowd, which was now beginning to include civilians as well, emerged medical personnel in white coats with black bags. It meant nothing. They were too late.


	5. Epilogue

His fingers find the cool stillness of other fingers in the darkness. They touch the strong hands, hands that once held guns and small children with equal care. He feels the starched edge of the jacket. He knows it is black, even though he can see nothing. He doesn't need to see, doesn't want to see. If he sees it, he knows he will have to face the reality. And he isn't ready for that yet.

Gently his hands move up the swell of a forearm beneath the crisp suit. Strong arms, he knows. Arms that were there to comfort him when he needed it, whether or not he chose to admit his own vulnerability at the time. Gliding over one firm shoulder, his fingers brush the smoothness of the face.

Peaceful in repose, perhaps, clean now of all the blood and sweat and grime that so often worked its way into the creases of the wide brow. His fingertips find thick eyebrows that he remembers arched, questioning his abilities. They stroke downwards over the nose. His thumb brushes the lips.

The chest, broad and strong, where a steady heart once beat. He remembers the power of that heart, the conviction with which the morals were upheld. He remembers listening to that heartbeat in darkness like this.

But the chest no longer rises. The lungs no longer draw air. Blood cannot flow in those veins. His hands close over the hands, tenderly, and one rises to the face again, drawn to the hair. It is still soft, still thick, still unruly and growing in a thousand different directions with equal fervour. Brown hair, he knows. With black eyebrows. And beneath the eyelids, green eyes.

His left hand, forefinger and middle finger bandaged, comes to rest on the motionless chest. His own shoulders shudder ever so slightly, and his eyes close as his head bows and the tears begin to fall.

If warmth could be given...if he could, with a touch, stir life in those veins...

If breath could be shared...if he could press his lips to that cold mouth and give years from his own destiny...

If love could save...


End file.
